The Opening of Shanghai as a Treaty Port

Two critical shifts in the political and social structure of ,Shanghai were wrought by the Opium War and the establishment of foreign settlements in the city (see Map 3). First, Shanghai's rise as a center of ,commerce changed the Chinese balance of power in the city, as merchants increasingly replaced gentry in authority and status. Merchant associa-

[6] Du, "Yapian zhanzheng qian Shanghai hanghui," 146-48; SBZX, 194-258. See also Linda Cooke Johnson, Shanghai: From Market Town to Treaty Port, 1074-1858 (unpublished manuscript, tentative tide), on pre-Opium War associations.

[7] The Fujian Quan-Zhang Huiguan (Quanzhou and Zhangzhou prefectures) was established as early as x757; the Guangdong Chaozhou Huiguan (Chaozhou prefecture) was established by 1783; and the Ningbo Huiguan (Siming Gongsuo) was established by 1797 (SXXZ, vol. 3, 2-4). An early association of sojourners from Guangzhou and Zhao-qing prefectures was established in Shanghai prior to the Chaozhou Huiguan; however, no records remain which provide a precise date. On the Ningbo group, see Shiba Yoshinobu, "Ningpo and Its Hinterland" in Skinner, The City in Late Imperial China , 436; and [ones, "The Ningbo Pang ."

Map 2.
Shanhai in the mid-nineteenth century: a Chinese view Source: Tongzhi
Shanghai  xian zhi (Tong- zhi-reign Shanghai: County gazetteer) Shanghai, 1871.

Map 3.
Shanghai in the mid-nineteenth century: a Western view. Source: All About Shanghai: A Standard Guidebook. Shanghai, 1934.

tions grew stronger and increased their role in local governance. Second, the establishment of foreign trade initially favored Guangdong people. In the decade after the opening of Shanghai to foreign trade, Guangdong officials and merchants swiftly rose to prominence and became (briefly) the most powerful Chinese group in Shanghai.^[8]

Immigration also disrupted the stability of preexisting political and economic relations, diversifying the social composition of sojourning communities and increasing the numbers of workers and semiemployed. With the new immigrants came secret-society organizations from the southeast coast, groups which thrived on the smuggling associated with foreign trade and the opium trade in particular. As smuggling spread and trade boomed, secret societies formed along native-place lines deepened their roots in the city. These developments strained the internal dynamics of individual sojourning communities. The result was an increasingly violent city.^[9]

Immigrants arrived in waves. Immediately after the opening of the port in 1843, several tens of thousands of Guangdong merchants, workers and adventurers traveled north to exploit the opportunities created by foreign trade. When the Taiping Rebellion obstructed trade and threatened south and central China in the 1850s, Shanghai experienced an influx of elite immigrants, many of them merchants from Ningbo prefecture in Zhejiang province. For both groups, preexisting native-place associations provided an important institutional framework, facili-

[8] See Leung Yuen-sang, The Shanghai Taotai: Linkage Man in a Changing Society, 1843-90 (Honolulu, 1990), 122-30; Mark Elvin, "Gentry Democracy in Shanghai, 1905-19147' (D. Phil. diss., University of Cambridge, 1967), 6-8. Just as a "merchant consul system" developed within Shanghai's western community in the 1840s and 1850s, so did merchant officials come to serve in Shanghai, among them Wu Jianzhang, who served as Su-Song-Tai Circuit Intendant (the highest Chinese government official based in Shanghai) in 1852-53. Fairbank, Trade and Diplomacy , 213-14., 393-96.

[9] Violent collective confrontations rocked Shanghai repeatedly in the second half of the nineteenth century, contrasting with Hankou in the same period, described by William Rowe as "remarkably free from open, large-scale group confrontations and protests ·.. the very model of a workable social unit." Rowe argues that "urban community disaggregation occurred relatively later in China than in Europe— in China essentially awaiting rather than preceding industrialization." See Rowe, Hankow: Conflict and Community , 1, 8-9. Rowe suggests that subcommunity ties (including native-place ties) helped to "nurture the larger community" and keep peace. Although at times Shanghai native-place groups helped maintain order, as the Small Sword Uprising and Ningbo Cemetery Riots demonstrate, they were also critical to the mobilization of social conflict. Shanghai's experience suggests that it is problematic to generalize from Hankou's experience· Shanghai/Han-kou differences might be explained by the greater western presence in Shanghai and the earlier western economic penetration. The opium trade, which boomed in Shanghai in the decade after the Opium War, was not a major factor in the Hankou economy until 186o. A more encompassing explanation must await further research on other Chinese cities.

tatting the new immigrants' ability to shift businesses to Shanghai and grasp new economic opportunities in the city. As the Taipings penetrated areas close to Shanghai in the early 1860s, thousands of gentry-refugees from the Suzhou area of Jiangsu and from northern Zhejiang fled to security in the foreign settlements of Shanghai, making up another early elite immigrant wave.^[10]